Line Drive Batting Avg.: What Does It Tell Us About Carlos Lee?
by clack on Jan 6, 2011 6:00 AM CST
in Stat Geeky
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PrintOne of the numerous question marks for the Astros' offense going into 2011 is whether Carlos Lee will rebound to an offensive level closer to his career marks. GM Ed Wade has indicated that he is depending on Lee returning to his former performance. That is one reason that a offhand remark by Dave Cameron in an unrelated fangraphs article attracted my attention.
In a discussion of Alcides Escobar, who was part of the Greinke trade, Cameron pointed to Escobar's weak line drive batting average in 2010 as an indication of bad luck:
The main cause of Escobar’s pitiful 2010 slash line? His .613 batting average on line drives, second worst in baseball among full time players – only Carlos Lee (.612) had a worse outcome on line drives. Of the 93 balls he hit hard enough to be judged liners, he only ended up with 57 hits. The league average is around .725 in most years, and the year-to-year correlation in BA on line drives is a minuscule .015, as the results appear to be mostly random.
Did you see what caught my eye? The mention of Carlos Lee. And I verified that Carlos Lee had the worst batting average (among qualifying players) on line drives in 2010. If Cameron's thesis is true that line drive batting average is relatively random, then this provides us a nice dose of optimism for improved hitting by Carlos in 2011.
As much as I want to be optimistic, Cameron's use of line drive batting average as a random result was new to me. Although it makes some sense, I couldn't recall any other studies which reached that conclusion. Also, given that there may be some subjectivity in distinguishing line drives from fly balls, one can imagine the possibility that some players are hitting mostly borderline line drives; and that's not even mentioning the possibility that stringers' bias could affect the classification of line drives and fly balls at various ballparks. Therefore, I decided to undertake a simple test to see if above or below average line drive batting average tends to regress toward the major league mean.
I picked 2007 out of the air, and utilized the 15 highest batting averages on line drives in that year. (Edward Encarnacion was No. 1 with a .859 batting average, and Albert Pujols was No. 15 with a .821 batting average.) All but one of the those 15 hitters had a lower batting average on line drives the next year, 2008. On average, the 15 hitters had a reduction in line drive batting average over 100 points.
I also examined the 5 lowest batting averages on line drives in 2007, and made a similar comparison for those players in 2008. (The five players were Theriot, Lugo, Kendall, A. Jones, and D. Roberts.) All but one (Kendall) of the five showed an increase in batting average on line drives in the following year (2008). The average increase in line drive batting average was 124 points.
I've summarized the 2007/2008 averages below:
AVERAGE
Top 15 LD Batting Average, 2007 .836
Next year LD Batting Average .734
Bottom 5 LD Batting Average, 2007 .612
Next year LD Batting Average .742
All players LD Batting Average, 2008 .728
For those of you who wonder what we mean by player regression, the comparisons above are a good example. The highest and lowest line drive batting averages in 2007 move close to the overall average line drive batting average in the next year. This little comparison supports Cameron's supposition that line drive batting average is more or less random. In case you are wondering, the Carlos Lee equivalents in 2007, Dave Roberts and Andruw Jones, increased their line drive batting averages into the .800's in 2008.
Like those two unlucky hitters in 2007, when Lee hit the ball hard in 2010, approximately 15% more than average were caught. Over his career, Lee's line drive batting average is .726, which is close to average. And an examination of Lee's year-to-year line drive batting averages indicates an up and down pattern consistent with random variation.
Chris Johnson is the opposite of Lee with respect to line drive batting average--his .803 was among the highest in the baseball in 2010. And, if line drive batting average is random, then this confirms our suspicion that Johnson is likely to sustain a significant decline in his batting average in 2011.
This comparison doesn't necessarily tell us what to expect in terms of future power from Carlos Lee. In 2010, Lee's slugging and isolated power on line drives was substantially below his average line drive power measures. It's not really obvious whether there is a declining power trend for Lee's line drives. And, the extent that slugging/ISO on line drives are random from year to year is not clear. If a ball is hit hard, there probably is a significant element of luck in determining whether it turns into extra bases. (On the other hand, it's possible that declining foot speed is a contributing factor too.) One reason for the low SLG and ISO on line drives is that Lee had no HRs off line drives in 2010. Lee has 26 HRs off line drives over his career, and the year to year pattern looks relatively random. In 2007, Lee had zero line drive HRs; so, 2010 isn't isolated.
This analysis also piqued my interest in examining other batting averages by batted ball types for Astros' hitters. I plan on writing more on this subject next week.
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I like this. It’s a more nuanced and interesting way of saying that his BABIP was bad this year and we expect it to go up next year. Interesting to note, too, that last year Carlos had a career low LD%. So he hit fewer line drives last year and had bad luck on the ones he did hit.
WOW!!!
It’s amazing how many stats people are pulling out for baseball these days. LOL, we don’t need any advanced stats to tell us what we already know.
Carlos Lee sucked last year…BAD, on live drives, HRs, fielding , pretty much every statistical category dude was a colossal waste of money. Luckily, he should improve this year because players tend to regress to the mean if they aren’t totally shot to $#!t. It would also be best for all of us if they kept his fat ass at 1B. This might not happen because everyone wants to see if Wallace can improve, and rightly so since he is so young. I think he should be sent to the minors for awhile but that’s just me.
Now you can break down that statement into UZR, WAR, OPS+, SLG, etc all you want but I’m willing to bet all that data will come to the same conclusion
by FunkytownKing on Jan 6, 2011 12:34 PM CST up reply actions
So a .725 average on line drives would have placed Carlos Lee with a .263 BA instead of .246. Better, but still would have been a career WORST along with a career worst in slugging. So, it’s ok to expect a slight rebound, but I’m betting on about .270, 25HRs, 95 RBIs for 2011. Two more years of the albatross contract….
by polarbear1982 on Jan 6, 2011 2:36 PM CST up reply actions
I hate to have to link to myself, as it looks a tad bigoted, but I wrote a piece looking at Lee’s 2010 line drive numbers in November.
If you look at where Lee hits his home runs and where he hits the ball more generally, you see 1) he’s lost his power to all fields (especially to centre field), and 2) he’s hardly hitting anything near the RF line.
While this was sort of true for Lee throughout his career, it was even more accentuated in 2010, and my theory on his LD hit rate being down massively is that teams are playing an outfield shift that is working perfectly in taking away base hits from Carlos.
I’ll go with the odds that Lee’s line drive batting average will increase quite a bit. The probability that it won’t is probably less than 10%. As for his power, that is still a question mark. I will get into more detail on that when I discuss fly balls and ball parks more in my next article. Personally, I doubt that he has a loss of power on his line drives which has any statistical meaning. My guess is that randomness plays a big role in line drive power measures, though probably not quite as much as for batting average. I think the loss of power is more likely to show up on Lee’s fly balls, since that is the major source of HRs and doubles. But I think there is more to be mined for a few Astros’ players, and not just Lee.
Also, I am skeptical that teams have made any major changes in the way that they play Lee in the outfield. Lee’s profile has always been as a LF-CF hitter, and I would be surprised if teams haven’t played him that way for a long time. I didn’t noticed any outfield shifts more extreme than normal for him last season. My guess is that opposing teams got a bit more lucky than normal with the effectiveness of the shifts.
Another factor is that Lee goes into a hit the ball up the middle mode with 2 strikes; I don’t know if he got into more 2 strike counts than normal last year, which might have produced more GBs to center and right. Lee’s GB batting average was .293 to CF and .368 to RF in 2010. He had a slight spike in his GB ratio, which didn’t help his power. I’m not sure if it means much though, because parsing the data produces small samples.
The thing that’s really intriguing about this is whether aging steals the number of line drives that are hit by a player. Completely anecdotally, I looked at one of the best hitters who might have line drive data in Tony Gwynn. The number of line drives he hit from 1988 to 1999 stayed right around the same number, but fell off precipitously in 2000 and 2001. However, if you look at the percentage of plate appearances where he hit line drives to his total plate appearances in that season, Gwynn stayed around 20 percent for that entire time, jumping up to 25-29 percent for his final three years in the majors. As I said, it’s not conclusive, but aging may not necessarily rob Lee of the ability to hit line drives.
I’m a simple man. I like pretty, dark-haired women and breakfast foods.
--Ron F'ing Swanson
This is where the comps on BR come in handy. Through age 34 Lee’s comp is Shawn Green, who a similar drop from 2003 to 2004. He bounced back in 2005 a remanded about career average to finish off his career.
by Timothy De Block on Jan 6, 2011 12:45 PM CST up reply actions
Line drive ratios (I’ll use that term to differentiate from LD batting average) are not very predictable. For individual players the line drive ratio is not as consistent as groundball and flyball ratios, when tend to be stable for particular players. Here is a Hardball Times snippet (“Maybe Line Drives By Batters Aren’t Predicatable After All”) which shows a R-squared of .05, based on Year 2004 line drive ratio predicting Year 2005 line drive ratios. That is a very low association.
So what exactly makes a line drive a "line drive"?
Number of milliseconds it takes for the ball to reach the perimeter of the infield diamond?
by goingforthecorner on Jan 7, 2011 10:41 AM CST reply actions
The trajectory of the ball is the basis for the classification. Three services provide line drive data: Gameday, Baseball Information Solutions, and STATS. Gameday uses a stringer at the game, whose decisions are cross-checked that night by the manager, and the next day by a video editor and then by Elias Sports Bureau. BIS and STATS have rotating scouts at each game, and they are cross checked by video scouts. Although there is some subjectivity in the line drive identification, the line drive percentages identified by each source are nearly the same. Some of the services compile unpublished data on how hard the LDs are hit (for use in defensive metrics) and separating a category called “fliners” between flies and LDs. (This information comes from several articles which followed a Hardball Times story (Colin Weyer) which suggested that press box locations at each ballpark could bias line drive identification.)
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